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Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

github.com

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#12
post #6

Looks very promising - I can't help wonder how you can spend time building a quality product like this, then release it for free : is there a monetization strategy at some point (i.e : pro support) ?

There is a Pro version in the works. The idea is to have a fully working open source variant with almost everything included. But if you want to monitor multiple servers, better support for multiple apps ( for example: color filter in the web interface ), email notifications , etc - then you can buy the Pro version. The Pro version will cost something that everyone can afford and it will be - pay once, use forever :)

pay once, use forever

Don't hesitate to charge a reasonable monthly fee. There's a lot of room to undercut the existing players (newrelic et al) and still make it a sustainable business.

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#14
This is the second or third time I've seen a service like this created (getexceptional.com and airbrake.io are two that come to mind quickly).

I can only hope this trend continues and in an open-architecture style. The ability to basically develop a skeleton monitoring UI that I can plug my own software into is fantastic.

My only thought is: why is this local to the machine I put it on? I'd rather have a central repository that I send me data to, like getexceptional. I don't mind having to set-up the process for each server I spin up, but I would prefer it if the information all aggregated to one source that I could browse through.

What I sort of imagine is registering for an Amon account and getting a unique key and identifier. Whenever I install Amon on a machine or want to call it from my code, I use that unique key and give the hardware a unique name and register my software service (pulling the hardware name from some config file automatically). Then, when I log into my central Amon account, I can browse through my exceptions and hardware details by machine name or software service.

Give me the ability to have multiple logging levels and I am in heaven.

Take it one step further: let fall-back be to either a local db or file-system and have a cron-job go through to try to fulfill the upload tasks.

That is definitely something I would pay $25-$50 a month for.

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#15

This is the second or third time I've seen a service like this created (getexceptional.com and airbrake.io are two that come to mind quickly). I can only hope this trend continues and in an open-architecture style. The ability to basically develop a skeleton monitoring UI that I can plug my own software into is fantastic. My only thought is: why is this local to the machine I put it on? I'd rather have a central repo…

[deleted]

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#16
post #5

I especially like the logging feature. Haven't had the chance to look at the code yet but how tightly coupled to mongodb is this? Would it be relatively easy to replace the store with redis?

It was Redis once :) But Redis is not a good database for storing Rails exceptions, that's why I replaced it with Mongo.

:) Thanks for sharing your work. If you have the time could you elaborate on why Redis is not good for Rails exceptions?

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#17

This is the second or third time I've seen a service like this created (getexceptional.com and airbrake.io are two that come to mind quickly). I can only hope this trend continues and in an open-architecture style. The ability to basically develop a skeleton monitoring UI that I can plug my own software into is fantastic. My only thought is: why is this local to the machine I put it on? I'd rather have a central repo…

Does this product match what you're looking for? (Pricing: "call for quote")

http://eqatec.com/Analytics/Overview.aspx

Edit: Per the Amon website, local-to-the-machine is a feature: "You don’t trust cloud based solutions and want to be in full control of your data"

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Redis once :) But Redis is not a good database for storing Rails exceptions, that's why I replaced it with Mongo.

:) Thanks for sharing your work. If you have the time could you elaborate on why Redis is not good for Rails exceptions?

Because at its best Redis is an in-memory database. That means saving log information to it ( the exceptions are log information after all ) will take RAM. And at some point you will have to migrate to bigger VPS just because of that. You can manage that with the expiring keys, but some people prefer to keep their logs for long time.

Re: Amon - web application debugging and monitoring toolkit

#20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a Pro version in the works. The idea is to have a fully working open source variant with almost everything included. But if you want to monitor multiple servers, better support for multiple apps ( for example: color filter in the web interface ), email notifications , etc - then you can buy the Pro version. The Pro version will cost something that everyone can afford and it will be - pay once, use forever :)

pay once, use forever Don't hesitate to charge a reasonable monthly fee. There's a lot of room to undercut the existing players (newrelic et al) and still make it a sustainable business.

Maybe I will do that, because it will be more convenient for some people. But the Pro version will always be an option for people that don't want to pay monthly charges and are OK with managing their own instances :)

P.S And of course the Open Source version will do the job for most people

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